Senator Inhofe Wins ‘Rubber Dodo’ Award For Climate Denial

Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe this year joins a list of dubious anti-environmental characters in receiving the Rubber Dodo award, given annually to those who have done the most to drive endangered species extinct.

The award is given each year by the Center for Biological Diversity. Previous winners include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (2011), former BP CEO Tony Hayward (2010), massive land speculator Michael Winer (2009), Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (2008) and Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne (2007).

When it comes to denying the climate crisis — the single-greatest threat now facing life on Earth — James Inhofe has few peers. The Oklahoma Republican is the ringleader of anti-science climate-deniers in Congress and a driving force behind the tragic lack of U.S. action to tackle this complex problem.

“As climate change ravages the world, Senator Inhofe insists that we deny the reality unfolding in front of us and choose instead to blunder headlong into chaos,” said Kierán Suckling, the Center’s executive director. “Senator Inhofe gets the 2012 Rubber Dodo Award for being at the vanguard of the retrograde climate-denier movement.”

This year is on track to become the warmest on record; some 40,000 temperature records have been broken in the United States in 2012 alone, while Arctic sea ice melted to a record low. According to conservation activists, this summer’s record droughts, crop failures, massive wildfires, floods are unmistakable signals that manmade global warming is tightening its grip, threatening people and wildlife around the globe.

“Senator Inhofe’s pet theory that climate change is an elaborate hoax would be hilarious, if only he weren’t an elected representative of the American people,” Suckling said. “If he were, say, a performance artist, it’d be really funny. But sadly he has the power to affect U.S. climate policy. The United States has a chance — and a duty — to take significant steps to slow the climate crisis, and a brief window of time before it’s too late for us to do so. Deniers like Inhofe, in positions of leadership, are dooming future generations of people to a far more difficult world.”

More than 15,000 people cast their votes in this year’s Rubber Dodo contest. Other official nominees were Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, who put a rider on a must-pass bill that stripped Endangered Species Act protection from wolves, and Shell Oil, a company bound and determined to pursue dangerous oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean.

Background on the Dodo
In 1598, Dutch sailors landing on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius discovered a flightless, three-foot-tall, extraordinarily friendly bird. Its original scientific name was Didus ineptus. (Contemporary scientists use the less defamatory Raphus cucullatus.) To the rest of the world, it’s the dodo — the most famous extinct species on Earth. It evolved over millions of years with no natural predators and eventually lost the ability to fly, becoming a land-based consumer of fruits, nuts and berries. Having never known predators, it showed no fear of humans or the menagerie of animals accompanying them to Mauritius.

Its trusting nature led to its rapid extinction. By 1681 the dodo was extinct, having been hunted and outcompeted by humans, dogs, cats, rats, macaques and pigs. Humans logged its forest cover while pigs uprooted and ate much of the understory vegetation.

The origin of the name dodo is unclear. It likely came from the Dutch word dodoor, meaning “sluggard,” the Portuguese word doudo, meaning “fool” or “crazy,” or the Dutch word dodaars meaning “plump-arse” (that nation’s name for the little grebe).

The dodo’s reputation as a foolish, ungainly bird derives in part from its friendly naiveté and the very plump captives that were taken on tour across Europe. The animal’s reputation was cemented with the 1865 publication of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Based on skeleton reconstructions and the discovery of early drawings, scientists now believe that the dodo was a much sleeker animal than commonly portrayed. The rotund European exhibitions were accidentally produced by overfeeding captive birds.

Bob Berwyn is Editor of the Summit County Citizens Voice. This piece was originally published at the Summit Voice and was reprinted with permission.

As the Latin Didus ineptus is now vacant perhaps it could be applied to those such as Inhofe, Sensenbrenner, Rohrabacher &co. who have misapplied so much hard sought knowledge about this life support system called planet Earth.

And I hope that the ‘Rubber Dodo’ is made of a hard rubber (or better still something that really does biodegrade) so that when he, and other recipients are beaten over the head with it it actually hurts, just a bit.

Perhaps they could be made to wear it using one of those criminal restraint electronic tags.

Inhofe ignores this reality, cocksure that it’s all perpetrated by climate activists.

This is not a bright man. His opinions are all based upon what’s good for business, not our planet. He should crawl back in his igloo and continue to stick his head in the sand. Errr, the parched earth.

Being serious here- It seems to me that, in the literal sense of the word (though, I suppose not yet in the legalistic sense), folks like Inhofe are guilty of crimes against humanity. His ‘out’ may possibly be that he actually believes what he says. In that case he is simply insane.

To persuade the public of the urgency of climate change, we need to turn a major denier like Inhofe. That is the crux of the issue: how to persuade the unreasoning.

Without broad social support, the WW2-scale of effort required isn’t likely to gain legitimacy. In fact, it’s likely to provoke outrage and harden opposition. Just look at Obamacare. That is small-time compared to shifting off fossil fuels within 20 years.

I really do feel like we’re where we were in 1860: an entire section of the country–bound pretty much by the same geography, but far from exclusively so–that simply doesn’t acknowledge the moral bankruptcy of its social outlook. There was no reasoning with the South in 1860. I certainly hope there’s an angle into their conscience on this issue.

Imagine the effect of James Inhofe on 60 Minutes doing an about-face. But how to get there? Any thoughts?

I would point to his brand of stupid being inspired by the likes of Steve Milloy, Marc Morano and Anthony Watts and also those renegade scientists, we know who you are, that have fed them with enough to prop up their ever more untenable stance on global warming and climate change.

Not forgetting the media shills like FOX pundits, Limbaugh and Delingpole who set out to make the masses as ignorant as Inhofe.